dailyprompt
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There are a number of words that bother me in common parlance. Let’s begin with Superpredator: The word “superpredator”, now almost exclusively used to report on wolf reintroduction in the American west, originated with a racially charged criminal theory in the 1990s designed to demonize juvenile offenders and imprison children for their entire lives. This…
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Every weird kid I’ve ever known selects one worldwide disaster and gets way too into it. I am, unfortunately, the weird kid who never grew out of the practice. I started with the Black Plague, then moved on to the geography of syphilis, then meandered around in the world of parasites and prions and smallpox…
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Life is a series of deaths, the most devastating of which occurs upon deciding there is nothing more worth learning. No opinions worth hearing that don’t validate your own, no more care for why the grass is green, for the stories the constellations are named for, for the sleeping giants in the museums. This is…
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Soup was the first food I learned how to make myself — chicken noodle, dumped from the can and into a pot and heated so my mom could wash her hands of me and return to work with a closed office door. Then began the raids on the spice cabinet: oregano, cayenne pepper, nutmeg for…
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The modern age is oft set on attaching our identities to objects. The things we own, the things we buy, what we can and can’t afford, and what that says about us to the culture as a whole. Objects act as our flags of wealth, identifiers. Find your aesthetic, your wardrobe staples, decorate in farmhouse…
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Societal decay begins with the erasure of complexity and nuance, and ends with brand loyalty. Your Gucci t-shirt was made in the same sweatshop as the Shein knock off, then marked up $100. The woman working 16 hours a day to afford food for her children isn’t going to see a cent of that good…
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I missed yesterday’s prompt because of its eyerolling assumption of comfort as king. I needed to sleep on it, consider why it made me groan aloud when I first saw it at 8:30 in the morning on a Tuesday. There is nothing wrong with curling up on the couch, tucked away from the heat of…
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I like to joke that I majored in climate anxiety. An ecology degree has done nothing for my job prospects, and an unquenchable curiosity about how the modern world works does very little to ease any of the existential ennui I live with day after day. In order to cope, I tend to go out…
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I moved out of my parents’ house five years ago. Finally pushed out of the nest despite financial strife from the sheer stress of being packed unendingly into a box with the rest of my family with no escape, not allowed my daily reprieve of the college campus for the exploding pandemic. So in one…
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We moved. See blog post from about a week ago. Our new apartment overlooks open pasture and a wide, shallow lake and features a balcony that you can watch the local prairie dog colony from. Well, if you’re human. If you’re a dog, you can listen to them bark but I don’t think you can…
from the pen of icarus blake 